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The Running Mate Who Wasn’t

The federal courthouse in St. Louis is named for him. Accomplished men and women have recounted how they were awed by his intellect, influenced by his humanity, inspired and enlisted by his passion. Thomas Eagleton was a giant of Missouri politics. But he was a giant bound by ties of his own peculiar design. He spent the first part of his career in the grip of a secret. Later, he was fettered to a question he answered countless times but never resolved.

“He was a man of decency, honor, humor, integrity,” George McGovern told me recently, rattling off Eagleton’s virtues until they veered abruptly off a rhetorical cliff, “with an incredible cover-up.”

Thomas Francis Eagleton grew up in St. Louis, the second son of a successful lawyer whose own political ambitions were thwarted. As a boy, Eagleton accompanied his father on political rounds. After college at Amherst, Eagleton attended Harvard Law School, where he surrendered a coveted post on the law review in order to return home and help manage his father’s campaign for mayor of St. Louis. The senior Eagleton lost. The son never did. After law school, he initiated an unbroken string of political victories. Eagleton was elected circuit attorney of St. Louis at age 27, Missouri’s youngest attorney general at 31 and, in 1964, the state’s youngest lieutenant governor at 35. Four years later, he claimed a Senate seat.

Yet Eagleton was an unlikely running mate for McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee. He supported a McGovern rival in the primaries, and according to the columnist Robert Novak, he spoke damagingly of McGovern off the record. But after Edward M. Kennedy and others refused McGovern’s entreaties, the call went out to Eagleton.

In a room with staff members, friends and even reporters present, Eagleton spoke on the phone with McGovern for less than a minute. McGovern’s aide Frank Mankiewicz subsequently asked Eagleton if he had any skeletons rattling around his closet. A terse denial inaugurated a latter-day industry of vice-presidential vetting.

Eagleton’s occasional hand tremors and tendency to perspire heavily were somehow overlooked in Washington. At a meeting before Eagleton’s official nomination, the McGovern campaign manager, Gary Hart was surprised, he told me recently, to see Eagleton “pouring with sweat” in the air-conditioned room.

In the 1960s, Eagleton and his family had taken great pains to hide his hospitalizations for mental illness, even diverting reporters with a tale about a stomach ailment. But after his nomination, an anonymous caller tipped off the McGovern campaign and the Knight news organization. The unraveling began.

With reporters rapidly closing in, Eagleton divulged at a news conference in South Dakota on July 25, 1972, that he had been hospitalized in 1960, 1964 and 1966 for what he first called “nervous exhaustion and fatigue” and later qualified as “depression.” He also said he had received electric-shock therapy. Many Democratic politicians and donors, sensing disaster, were irate. Nixon aides reveled in the Democrats’ misfortune.

Eagleton later explained that he had never considered his health history “sinister” — no closet, no skeleton. Years after, in his own narrative housed at the University of Missouri archives, Eagleton said that he had a “brief and random” exchange with his wife, Barbara, before he was asked to join the ticket. “If you should get [the nomination], won’t your health history come out?” she asked. Eagleton responded, “It could, I suppose.”

Photo

Eagleton during an interview in Kansas City in July 1972, before his mental illness was revealed.Credit
Bern Ketchum/The New York Times

In two interviews, McGovern told me Eagleton related a longer version when they met just before Eagleton’s startling news conference. “We had a meeting with Tom and his wife and Eleanor and me in Sylvan Lake in the Black Hills of South Dakota,” he said. It was Eleanor McGovern who asked the question that dogged Eagleton then and ever after. “Why didn’t you tell George about this illness?”

According to McGovern, now 85, Eagleton responded that he and his wife had had a lengthy discussion “back and forth, back and forth” and concluded that McGovern would reject him if the truth were known. “ ‘We decided you wouldn’t ask me [to join the ticket] if I told you,’ ” McGovern said Eagleton explained.

The political consultant Robert Shrum, a McGovern friend who worked on the ’72 campaign, said that in the mid-1970s McGovern told him the same story and that he heard it a second time from Eleanor McGovern many years later.

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But Barbara Eagleton, the only other surviving member of the meeting’s discordant quartet, flatly denied McGovern’s assertion. “It never happened,” she told me. “Can you imagine asking that question? I think there would have been total animosity on the part of McGovern if that had happened.”

When I spoke with him, McGovern also characterized his private telephone conversations with two of Eagleton’s doctors, which took place immediately before Eagleton’s withdrawal from the race. “They both said we think he can do fine in the Senate,” McGovern told me. “But when it comes to trusting the whole country to one man, that’s different.” McGovern said Eagleton had bipolar disorder — manic depression. Barbara Eagleton said: “It was not manic depression. It was depression.”

To leave the ticket, Eagleton demanded a statement from McGovern that his health was not a factor. He got it. In a measure of the public’s ambivalence, Gary Hart said calls to the campaign, which had been overwhelmingly negative about Eagleton after the revelations, suddenly switched to overwhelmingly positive after his departure.

The public trial enhanced Eagleton’s stature. He resumed telling jokes in the Senate cloakroom, led debate on a war-powers resolution and passionately argued for an end to the Vietnam War. He was particularly proud of his successful amendment to stop funds for the bombing of Cambodia.

For years, friends in Washington sensed tension between the McGoverns and Eagletons. Eleanor’s anger barely softened. Eventually, George’s did. “I know a little about political ambition,” he told me.

Eagleton retired from the Senate in 1987, undefeated. The Eagletons returned to St. Louis, where he took up law, teaching and a hefty civic load. Though he gradually lost his health and hearing, Eagleton remained passionate about public affairs, firing off letters to protégés, friends and political leaders. He was outraged by the Iraq war, pleading with Bill Clinton in a 2006 letter to forgo “the traditional silence of an ex-president in wartime.”

Late in life, Eagleton began collecting art. He was particularly fond of the German photographer Candida Höfer, whose work features public architecture of uncluttered environs and clear boundaries. Her photographs convey the scale of the public sphere. But her libraries, theaters and government halls are containers devoid of people, empty of the struggle and striving of human affairs. In a singular political life, Eagleton had experience enough to fill the void.